“The magnificent cause of being, / The imagination, the one reality / In this imagined world . . . ” —Wallace Stevens Though ten years have passed since his death on April 29, 1994, Russell Kirk has yet to be the subject of a definitive intellectual biography.  In his own posthumously published autobiography, The Sword...

“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare Initially, Kevin Phillips intended his new book, American Dynasty, to be a study of the Bush-related transformation of the U.S. presidency into an increasingly dynastic office, a change with profound consequences for the American Republic, given the factors of family bias, domestic special...

Even under a “conservative” President, government entitlements continue to grow.  President George W. Bush’s expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs will add billions to the already overinflated budget.  And, despite warnings from Alan Greenspan that Social Security is on the verge of default, neither political party is willing to address the issue.  Americans have...

Writing—literary creation in the fullness of the sense that we have known it in the previous century and even in the one before, from the French and Russian masters, the daft Irish, the mad Yankees, the haunted Southerners (and from elsewhere, of course)—sometimes seems to be on the way out.  Senses of language, of irony,...

What is Pete Rose’s explanation for failing to remember, throughout his life, his mother’s birthday?  “I just can’t seem to concentrate on things I’m not interested in.” Ever since the news broke that Pete Rose was ready, after 14 years of lies, to admit what most people already believed—that, yes, he did bet on baseball—the...

Longtime readers of Chronicles are familiar with John Shelton Reed, who used to write a column for this magazine.  Those less familiar may recall the occasional news story based on the latest intelligence-gathering done by the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, which Professor Reed founded.  Well-known among his fellow...

Poet John Clare (1793-1864) seems to have grown from the soil.  His last name derives from the word clayer—someone who manures and enriches clay.  As a farm laborer, he drew sustenance from the earth.  Immersed in humus, he learned the humility so necessary to creativity.  His poems, like furrow lines, break the surface of things...

The problem of evil has confounded humans throughout history.  Philosophers and theologians have perennially constructed systems and myths to assuage the perception of the contingency of life.  Religious belief, at least in Western civilization, usually filled in the gaps between the “ought” and the “is” that conflicted in the minds of those affected by the...

Brenda Wineapple’s new biography of the most brilliant flower of the New England Renaissance reminded me that it was time to reread Hawthorne.  She delineated the man very well, got his politics almost right, but barely did justice to his work. Writing in 1847, ten years after the publication of Hawthorne’s first collection of stories,...

William Butler Yeats was not talking about literally sailing to a literal Byzantium in his famous poem, and I know that Urbino is a mountain fastness, not a port.  Even so, sailing to Urbino is necessary, and it does not matter how you do it—only that you do.  One way to approach Urbino is through...

“The tone and tendency of liberalism . . . is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.” —Benjamin Disraeli On April 14, 1996, the Washington Post published a 2,700-word article by liberal journalist...

This book joins dozens of others that have been written over the past two years with the goal of subjecting President George W. Bush’s foreign policy to critical scrutiny.  Clyde Prestowitz’s objections are often justified—notably on the Middle East—and stated with clarity.  His recommended remedies reflect a strong One World liberal bias, however, while failing...

In the political writings of Alexis de Tocque-ville (1805-1859), Francis Lie-ber (1798-1872), and Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), we find insights, opinions, and warnings of great current applicability, especially with regard to international affairs.  The task Professor David Clinton sets himself in this excellent study is not, however, primarily to draw conclusions concerning the present but to...

“The Empire is peace.” —Napoleon III If the publishing industry has played any part in the supposed recent economic revival, it can, perhaps, thank George W. Bush.  The President’s foreign policy has made it possible to sell thousands of books with the words empire or imperial in the title.  Indeed, it sometimes seems as if...

You Can’t Say That!  The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws by David E. Bernstein Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute; 197 pp., $20.00 A Miller Brewing Company executive is fired for retelling a racy segment of a Seinfeld episode at the watercooler.  An unwed teacher successfully sues the parochial school that fired her for becoming pregnant...

The first volume of R.F. Foster’s acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats (The Apprentice Mage) appeared in 1997.  Yeats’ son and daughter (now in their 70’s) chose him to be their father’s official biographer after their previous choice, F.S.L. Lyons, passed away, and Foster has been working on this project for the past 17 years. ...

To say that Edward Fitzgerald is a retired lawyer who has written a memoir of his military experiences in the 1950’s may not make his book sound at first like the most exciting literary project of the year.  Bank’s Bandits is, however, a highly readable work: a well-observed, literate, and often very funny account of...

Politics, said Henry Adams, “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”  In recent months, best-seller lists have helped to prove Adams’ point, by featuring many vituperative political tracts from the left and right.  The undisputed queen of the genre is Ann Coulter, whose overheated book Slander sold like hotcakes in 2002; lately, she has...

Englishness may be coming back into fashion.  After the union of the English and Scottish crowns and the foundation of modern Britain in 1603, the idea of Englishness was increasingly submerged in, and confused with, the idea of Britishness.  It now looks as if the English may be becoming self-conscious again.  Three centuries of outward-looking...

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” —Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire Sometimes, enlightenment, like confusion, can come from an unexpected source.  Take the comedian, George Carlin, for example.  I think that his broadcasting of dirty words is a bit less than profound, as is his hostility toward most civilized conventions; some...

For some time now, American law and lawyers have had a legitimacy problem.  Most Americans must wonder how it is that unelected federal judges have the power to declare that no state government can punish consensual homosexual relations, prohibit abortion, or permit prayer in the schools (to mention just a few of the striking things...

Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec, S.J., was an eyewitness to the 20th century’s most important event: the defeat of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe by the Church established by Jesus Christ.  At age 27, Korec was secretly consecra-ted as a bishop in Slovakia, a largely Catholic nation of five million.  He led the underground Church after the...

To judge from its title, we could reasonably expect this book to be about the growing gulf between women and men.  Yet Andrew Hacker, a professor of political science at Queens College, spends much of the book reciting differences between the sexes that have always existed.  With cumbersome detail (as if imparting new and fresh...

Robert Stove has written a readable and intelligent survey of secret policing, which he defines as “governments’ surveillance of their own subjects, as distinct from espionage.”  Sensibly, he does not try to cover every known instance of this behavior but focuses on some celebrated instances, including the French police state of the 18th and 19th...

The Geography of Thought is an exercise in cultural polarization that makes two basic claims: There are profound cognitive differences between Westerners and Asians; and these differences have maintained themselves with striking continuity for thousands of years.  Richard Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, locates the two utterly different modes of thought...

It is difficult sometimes to remember the days before September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush was a decidedly ordinary President whose anemic victory the previous fall had required a month’s worth of recounts and court decisions to confirm.  After the terrorist attacks, President Bush’s approval rating soared, and his administration sought and received vast...

The Burma campaign included some of the most charismatic and colorful soldiers of World War II: Vinegar Joe Stilwell and his X-Force, Claire Chennault and his Flying Tigers, Frank Merrill and his Marauders; the British commanders Harold Alexander, William Slim, Archibald Wavell, Claude Auchinleck, Orde Wingate and his Chindits, and Lord Louis Mountbatten, luxuriously ensconced...

“Poetry requires not an examining but a believing frame of mind.”  —T.B. Macaulay  In the United Kingdom, back in 1997, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was voted “the greatest book of the twentieth century” in several major polls, emerging as a runaway winner ahead of its nearest rival, Orwell’s 1984.  Tolkien was also voted...

Andrei Navrozov’s newest book of reminiscences is intended to be the literary and photographic proof of his “internal exile.”  By this term, he underscores his distance from the present age, in which philistine housewives have seized control of our social and political institutions and mass culture has become increasingly degraded.  In this present time of...

Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an economic historian whose scholarship focused on the origins of capitalism and questions of economic and social equity.  In his early career, he was part of a broader Catholic and conservative intellectual movement that was active during the interwar years and included the English Distributists and the Southern Agrarians.  Like these...

The recent battle over the removal of a 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments placed in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court by Chief Justice Roy Moore has deep religious and civil roots stemming from the Protestant Reformation and provides an excellent historical study of religion, law, and public policy in America. Two recent...

Dr. Clyde Wilson’s new gathering will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, as some parts of it have appeared in these pages and as he has for years maintained a special relationship with Chronicles.  Yet I hasten to add that the compelling quality of these essays speaks broadly to the most vital...

“The eternal gods do not lightly change their minds.” —Homer, Odyssey Rodney Stark is considered by many to be the greatest living sociologist of religion.  Generations of English-speaking students have used his textbook Sociology, now in its eighth edition.  Stark was one of the founders of the theory of religious economy, which replaced the earlier...

Most Rockfordians are familiar with the garishly modern Winnebago County Courthouse at 400 West Main Street, which is easily recognized by its filthy cement exterior and offensive “contemporary” style.  It was not that much better at the turn of the 20th century, as far as I knew, until I received a copy of Eric A....

Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, writes often and writes well.  I have two of his books on ancient Greece.  He is the only author who has ever explained to me how difficult it was to wreak permanent agricultural devastation on a typical Greek city-state: Pulling out grape vines...

Social Life and Moral Judgment by Antony Flew New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction; 179 pp., $34.95 Antony Flew is one of Britain’s most lucid analytical philosophers and the most skilled demolisher of the myths of social justice that his country has ever produced.  His new book, published in the United States, should prove of great interest...

“Debate is masculine; conversation is feminine.” —A. Bronson Alcott For decades, a massive problem has been aborning in all Western countries: the increasingly difficult-to-ignore presence of ever-growing and restive ethnic minority groups alienated from the majority communities surrounding them.  These disparate groups—emboldened by our enervation and in thrall to ethnocentric demagogues masquerading as “antiracists” and...

The sheer inanity of so much fiction today sends us necessarily to the past, and not always to Balzac and Trollope.  If we are looking for something readable and American and modern, then this gathering is just the thing.  Indeed, for sheer readability (if not for the finest quality), James M. Cain is hard to...

In 1994, Lois Lindstrom, an American, moved to Stockholm.  There she befriended Karin Wiking, then in her early 70’s, and from their regular conversations grew this very personal book about Mrs. Wiking’s life and experiences.  Like so many others during and right after World War II, Wiking ably served her country and the dispossessed of...

Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette by Bill Kauffman New York: Henry Holt and Company; 207 pp., $22.00 A decade ago, a friend of mine was working for a prestigious law firm in Washington, D.C., which had decided to institute a “paperless” office.  The process would take a couple of years; in the interim, to smooth the...

The 1930’s were marked by intellectual trauma as well as by economic hardship.  What had caused the apparent catastrophic crash of “capitalism”—collapse of equity, vanishing demand, and vast unemployment?  The desire to diagnose the cause and prescribe a remedy created many ideas and movements.  Some achieved success of a sort, and others went unheeded. The...

“Always do what you are afraid to do.” —Anonymous Fall 2000 already seems like a long time ago, and it actually is.  Perhaps I remember in a haze of nostalgia for that period, a brief entertainment of hope for the American polity, one which was soon snuffed in a blizzard of dimpled chads and a...

Vladimir Nabokov—like Hemingway, Lorca, and Borges—was born in 1899, began life in the stable Victorian era, lived through the horrors of the Great War, and came to artistic maturity in the 1920’s.  Driven out of Russia by the revolution of 1917, exiled in Berlin and Paris for the next two decades, Nabokov reached New York...

Anti-Catholicism is far from new to  America, but there certainly is a new anti-Catholicism in America.  In the mid-19th century, anti-Catholic abolitionists, Know-Nothings, evangelicals, and Republicans railed against what the 1856 GOP platform derisively called the “twin relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy.”  Today, anti-Catholic feminists, homosexuals, liberal Protestants, and Democrats hold fast to the...

To a woman who has spent several decades of her life in New Orleans, a city that lies mostly below sea level, any trip out is a journey to higher ground.  And so Catharine Savage Brosman’s title works for a book of essays mostly about journeys away (though she includes a nice piece on New...

One of the pleasures of fiction is the opportunity that novels, short stories, and epic poems give us to escape from our own everyday world into an alien world of gods and heroes (as in the Iliad) or knights and wizards (Tennyson’s Idylls), English villagers (in Hardy’s Wessex), or Mississippi rednecks and redskins (of Faulkner’s...

“An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson  Hitler & Churchill—Secrets of Leadership is made from Andrew Roberts’ recent BBC television series, Secrets of Leadership, in which he sought to tease out the management secrets of four famous charismatic leaders—Hitler, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Ken-nedy. With this...

There will always be tension between America’s experiment with democracy and hierarchically structured Roman Catholicism, because the two proclaim different concepts of freedom.  While the former is grounded in the individualism of Protestantism and, more recently, of secularism, the latter regards true freedom as being circumscribed by claims imposed by considerations of the common good...